


Drowning In Air

by MaevynRaven



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Trans Female Character, non-binary!adora, trans!Catra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26908825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaevynRaven/pseuds/MaevynRaven
Summary: Catra has a rough day. Scorpia tries to comfort her friend, and Catra navigates a particularly nasty dysphoria attack.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	Drowning In Air

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies if tags or formatting are weird, I’ve never posted anything before, or even written anything like this for that matter! This was actually suggested by my therapist, so I’m giving it a try. I have a vague idea of what happened before and after this but I have no clue if I could make a story from it, so it is what it is for now. Major CW for dysphoria, I’m a trans girl and this is the way I experience it, and I wanted to get some of it out of my system through venting. Trans/NB lovelies reading this please take care of yourselves, and stop reading if necessary <3 there is a brief reference to self-harm, something I also struggle with, but it does not happen in the story. Also, I HC Adora as a she/they non-binary girl, in case the pronoun situation is confusing when she is discussed briefly.

Catra stormed through the apartment door, unconcerned with the amount of noise she was making, despite the late hour. Slamming it shut, she tossed her keys down onto the coffee table with a huff. As she began making her way towards the dark comfort of her bedroom, a voice drew her attention: Scorpia, sitting at the table, seemingly having a late night snack. “Oh, hey Wildcat!”, she smiled at Catra. For just a moment, Catra felt her heart soften. Despite how unresponsive and sometimes downright mean Catra was to her, Scorpia always greeted her with warmth and kindness. No one had done that for her since... the smile that was growing on Catra’s face withered and died on her lips as flashes of the argument she’d had with Adora less than an hour ago danced through her mind. Her blue eyes, hurt and brimming with tears, the sudden bitterness in their voice as they yelled after Catra, Catra responding by turning and running off into the night because she had never been able to do anything but run. The small glow of happiness she had felt in that brief moment was replaced with a flash of anger, but that quickly mellowed into a sad, hollow ache. Her heart felt heavy, and the exhaustion of her day finally caught up to her all at once. Scorpia said something else in a concerned tone but it didn’t register in Catra’s ears. She had one thing on her mind: get to her room, where she could block out the world and be alone. She began wordlessly striding across the hall, tossing her black leather coat onto the couch as she went, before slipping into the cool room and shutting the door, finally collapsing onto her bed. She heard the muffled sound of a barstool scraping against tile, as if Scorpia was rising to follow her, but after a few footsteps shuffled against the kitchen floor there was quiet again. Catra was grateful. She didn’t have the energy to talk to anyone just then. She would only get angry, lash out and drive her last friend even further away. Why was she even still there in the first place? What could Scorpia possibly see in a fuckup like her? Catra sighed and rolled over, back facing the door. She took a breath, trying to calm down. The cool sheets brushing up against her skin were calming, as was the gentle and continuous rattle of the AC unit in the corner. To be honest, that air conditioner was the only thing keeping her sane at times. Catra didn’t like noisy places, but the silence was infinitely more deafening. She snorted humorlessly at the fact that a rusty pile of scrap metal that choked out dusty, stale air had become her best friend during her time living here. Slowly, another sound rose to meet the steady hum already filling the space. Catra couldn’t place it at first, but as the sound increased in volume it became evident that someone was heating water on a kettle. Probably Scorpia making tea for some dumb new meditation routine Perfuma had taught her. Catra felt an immediate twinge of guilt at calling her friend dumb, but quickly scolded herself for feeling remorse. She didn’t need guilt. Guilt made her weak, kept her vulnerable. Catra pulled an extra pillow from next to her up to her chest and plunged her nose into the soft fabric, hoping this would somehow stop her rambling thoughts and grant her the peace of mind necessary to get whatever nightmare-ridden and restless span of sleep the gods would allow her that night. After an indeterminate amount of time drifted by, there came a knock at her door. It was tiny. Faint. If Catra hadn’t been laying so still she doubted she would have heard it at all. She considered answering, but decided against it. It could wait until morning. The sound drew her attention to the fact that the kettle in the other room was no longer boiling, but Catra hadn’t noticed how long ago it had gone quiet. Slowly, her door opened. Despite the only light present coming from a lamp positioned behind her in the other room, Catra squinted against it. She didn’t move, and tried to steady her breathing as if she were asleep. She doubted it was very convincing, seeing as she had only gotten home a few minutes ago, but she remained silent anyway. She heard Scorpia speak, barely a whisper, as the door opened more and she took a step in. “Hey, Catra. If you’re still awake, I brought you some tea. You’ve clearly had a rough day, so I thought it might help calm you down”. Every thought in Catra’s mind screamed for her to acknowledge the act, to reach out, to say thank you. She felt a flicker of affection build in her chest. But to even her own disappointment, she remained still. After a pause, she heard footsteps quietly approach, the sound of a mug being set on a nightstand, and then Scorpia shuffling away again. There was another moment of tense silence, before a few more words met Catra’s ears. They were so tiny, so quiet she could have imagined them, but at the same time they seemed to fill up the whole room and echo in her head afterwards: “Goodnight, Wildcat”. With that, the door was shut, and the room was dark and silent once more. Catra waited until she heard the door to Scorpia’s bedroom click shut before sitting up. She inhaled shakily, and reached out a hand for the mug. The warmth radiating off of it and into her palm was comforting. For the second time that night, Catra allowed a smile to flit across her face. She inhaled the steam that was lazily making its way into the air, and was greeted with the warm scent of lemons and ginger. It was her favorite. She had mentioned that fact off-handedly one time a few weeks ago and yet... Scorpia had remembered? Catra mentally kicked herself for every little thing she’d ever said to hurt her roommate, every biting word or rude comment. Maybe there was something there, some tiny spark between them Catra had been too angry and ungrateful to notice before. The thought tugged at the back of her mind, but she pushed it down and decided she was much too tired to think about anything like that just then. She nearly burned her mouth taking a small sip of the tea, but couldn’t deny how much better it made her feel. Over the next 15 or so minutes, she thoughtfully sipped the drink Scorpia had brought her, finally beginning to calm down for the first time in hours. But to no surprise of Catra’s, the joy brought to her by this gentle act of caring didn’t last. Nothing ever seemed to last for her. She had just taken a rather long swig of her hot beverage, and as she wiped her mouth on her sleeve a hand brushed up against her jaw. The skin on her fingers registered a slight prickle instead of smoothness where they made contact, and just like that the emotional stability that had been slowly rising to its feet had its shaky legs kicked from beneath it and was sent crashing back into the dirt below. She felt a familiar bloom of burning discomfort build in her chest. It came, every day, sometimes expected and sometimes out of the blue, always building up with this hot, prickly disgust before brutally crushing her. Her thoughts began to spiral as the burning sensation grew, tension rising in her torso like a rubber band being stretched farther and farther. She almost groaned at how stupid this was. Something that should be so inconsequential had such awful implications for her. Despite being well acquainted with the effect it would have, she shakily brushed her fingers along her jaw again, from her ear to her chin, and as she did so the rubber band finally snapped, and she was hit by it. The dysphoria crashed into her chest like a freight train. It felt like her ribs were collapsing, being struck over and over with a crowbar as she struggled to keep air in her lungs. Despite years of trying to find ways to alleviate it, Catra could never figure out how to abate the pain, not fully. Her abdomen burned, smoldering with heat as she felt as if the air around her had collapsed inward and was pulling her down into a single point. A flip book of every tiny flaw she had ever located on herself, any little detail that could be plausibly seen as a deviation from a standard female body that she had burned into her mind with years of harsh scrutiny opened up and began playing in her mind. With every page turn, the mass of boiling pain and crushing weight slowly writhed within her, wrenching at her heart and reaching its clawed hands into her throat and squeezing, grabbing, crushing her wind pipe and choking the breath out of her body. The agonizing emotion filled her entire being, twisting and turning but slowly evolving from outright torture to a looming abyss of hopelessness. A deep, hollow emptiness that filled every crevice of her body. The ripping claws and molten iron searing her flesh slowly relented, but her throat was still clenched tight and her heart felt as if it had been crushed beneath the heels of ten thousand boots. It always ended like this. Dread led to suffering, which led to a burning explosion of self hate, which in turn slowly died down into hopeless despair. Catra remembered the first time she had experienced dysphoria. She didn’t know what was happening to her, didn’t have a word for the sudden primal longing filling her bones, longing to be something or someone else, nor did she have the words to describe the horrifying disconnect of mind and body, or that damned emotion, stronger and more brutal than any other she had ever felt before. She was just a girl, a kid, no older than ten. How could she know that when she had casually flipped a magazine page and glanced at some female model that all of her muscles would seize up, paralyzing her, or that the breath would be ripped from her lungs and her world would come crashing down around her? She couldn’t even cry then, she just felt the pain and confusion and fear sweep over her and seize her in its merciless, unbreakable grasp. She had felt so small and alone then, utterly defenseless and filled with fear. Even as an adult, the sea of swarming claws and grasping fingers seemed infinite, and looking back to think about the tiny girl huddled in the corner, shaking and desperately clutching at her head as she buried her face in her knees filled Catra with an unending fiery hate against the universe that scorched hotter and blazed brighter than the heat of the dysphoria that was still grasping onto her. It wasn’t fair. What had she ever done to deserve something like that? What could a child do to deserve her life being twisted forever, forced down a path she had no choice but to follow? No, she may not have been able to cry in that first terrifying moment, but she could now. Catra felt stinging tears cut valleys down her cheeks. Her throat burned and clenched and she wanted to cry out like a dying animal, yelling at the world, screaming and clawing at it until whatever forces had made her like this were shredded to gory pieces and reduced to nothingness, nothing but this feeling, the feeling of being as broken and lost as she was. At this point Catra had curled herself into a tiny ball, tea long forgotten, as sobs racked her whole body. Her abdomen hurt from crying so hard. She didn’t care that Scorpia could probably hear her through the thin walls of their apartment. A flash of longing for the stinging release of pain flitted through her brain, a plea to let the cool, biting steel against her arm quiet the voices in her head, to ground her and calm her and give her just a second of peace. But Catra was tired. Too tired to even try to cope. So she instead opted for just riding it out in miserable silence. The impulse came and went as her body slowly stilled. Desperate breaths become more controlled. She realized that she had completely submerged herself under her thick blanket, but it was no longer a comforting or safe shield from the world. It had become a suffocating prison amplifying her suffering, keeping her trapped in this nightmare. She needed it off, almost desperately. On the verge of sudden panic, she grabbed and tore it from where it had been covering her and threw it to the floor, hands shaking. As the cool air of the bedroom met her skin, she noticed the sweat that had built along her forehead, and she slowly inhaled before dragging her sleeve across her face to deal with both the sweat and the tears. She laid back, taking a shaky breath. Sometimes, her dysphoria was negligible enough that it could be ignored all day. And sometimes, it left her like this. If it happened in the morning, she could be left laying in the dark all day trying to recuperate. Every word exchanged with another being on those days seemed to amplify the discomfort tenfold. It made her feel so weak. And when Catra felt weak, she became furious and aggressive. She wanted to lash out at anything or anyone that moved. She knew there was no one she could blame for her situation so she settled for blaming everyone. Anyone in her way, no matter how kind or caring they were to her, got burned when they stepped to close. That wasn’t her fault. Was it? No, Catra decided if anyone was dumb enough to care about her they got what was coming to them. Some part of her that was deprived of affection and was tired of longing to be cared about screamed at her for shutting everyone out, but at this point she was so exhausted she barely cared. Her thoughts began to slow, and she felt her sharp senses begin to dull and fade. Finally, after the cool breeze had lowered her temperature and steadied her breath, Catra slipped out of consciousness to the low rattle of the AC unit, and fell into a deep and feverish sleep.


End file.
